High School Sports
TentakilRex
- Land O Insects between Quincy-Macomb-Jacksonville
Football practice starts on Wednesday
TentakilRex
- Land O Insects between Quincy-Macomb-Jacksonville
Curbelo Fanboy
BERTBALL IS LIFE
Season will be 3 weeks deep by Labor Day weekend due to the IHSA adding a week to the playoffs so 3-6 or 2-7 teams can qualify. In the pantheon of IHSA dumb decisions this is in the team photo along with 4 class basketball. Old guy will now step down from his soap box.
Just because there's that many kids in the school doesn't mean they can get enough to go out for football. Tough to get players to come out when you've had 0 or 1 win in every season since they last made the playoffs a decade ago.
Football isn't just a sport where you sign up your freshman year and give it a shot. Guys at the freshmen level have, for the most part, played multiple years prior. Nor is it a sport where you get to your freshman year and just stop playing because the varsity is historically bad.
You have the chicken/egg argument going on when you say it's hard to get kids to come out when you're winning 1 game or less every year. If the youth programs were run properly, you'd have a better caliber of players, in larger numbers and you'd be winning more games.
The problem starts at the pee wee level and it filters right up through the feeder programs. That's where the failure (for the lack of a better term) is at. Something isn't working at the ground level. It's either a decreasing interest in football for another sport perhaps (?) or a lack on community support for the programs. With a 1,000 kid enrollment, you should have enough kids to field a team at all levels.
Much, much bigger problem there than the varsity team. That's just the obvious and unfortunate result.